By Antonis K. Petrides
This publication argues that New Comedy has a much richer functionality texture than has formerly been known. supplying shut readings of all of the significant performs of Menander, it indicates how intertextuality - the sustained discussion of recent Comedy functionality with the varied ideological, philosophical, literary and theatrical discourses of up to date polis tradition - is essential in developing semantic intensity and hence offsetting the effect that the plots are simplistic love tales without political or ideological resonances. It additionally explores how the visible element of the performs ('opsis') is simply as very important as any verbal technique of signification - a phenomenon termed 'intervisuality', studying particularly intensity the ways that the masks can infuse a number of platforms of reference into the play. mask just like the panchrēstos neaniskos (the 'all-perfect youth'), for instance, at the moment are jam-packed with that means; therefore, with their ideologically marked physiognomies, they are often robust instigators of literary and cultural allusion.
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Extra resources for Menander, New Comedy and the Visual (Cambridge Classical Studies)
In Aristotle, ēthos capability either ‘character’ and ‘characterisation’. motion as an element of drama is obviously ahead of ‘characterisation’, the categorical presentation of personality quite often via rhēseis ēthikai. in spite of the fact that, ‘character’ and motion are intertwined, simply because: (a) ‘character’ for Aristotle is a disposition to motion; and (b) vice versa, motion kinds behavior (hexis, synētheia) and behavior varieties ēthos. 25 26 of personality interest’. A extra actual translation, after all, will be ‘devoid of or insufficient in characterisation’; see less than. Cf. the baffled phrases of F. L. Lucas (1957: 140): ‘One may perhaps ask yourself, notwithstanding, how a thinker who concept the top lifestyles was once that of contemplative psychological task may perhaps so favor motion to personality during this slightly behaviourist view of drama. ’ a couple of pages above, Lucas had characterized Aristotle’s justification of this ‘behaviourism’ as ‘not relatively important of a thinker’ (F. L. Lucas 1957: 137). usually the idea is that ēthos atones for Menander’s dreary plots, cf. Keuls (1975: 195). 171 Of Greeks and others Aristotelian ēthos, for that reason, could be ‘permanent’ within the experience that it truly is responsible and observable in any given scenario; but, being the impact of interplay among actual endowment (dynamis) and purchased behavior (hexis), and ranging with age, situation and circumstance,27 ēthos is renegotiated at each example of ethical selection. faraway from ever being ‘fixed’, ēthos is over and over topic to being redefined in motion: it really is either the manufacturer and the manufactured from selection in an ongoing procedure. I shall difficult on those suggestions within the subsequent part, to understand this Aristotelian oxymoron that's so crucial within the comedy of Menander: Greek comedy depicting personality has to prioritise motion by way of necessity; and masks that denotes ēthos is at once engaged no longer with ‘idiosyncrasy’, yet with ethical selection (prohairesis) within the face of in actual fact defined possible choices. the total factor turns into much more spell binding within the mild of the aforementioned paradox that younger males particularly, our crucial trouble during this bankruptcy, represent a class of ethical agent whose ēthos, back in keeping with Peripatetic criteria, continues to be unconsolidated, whose proairetic schools are immature and volatile. 28 The flexibility and the fluidity instead of the fixedness of younger ēthos is a leitmotif of Aristotelian philosophy: younger ēthos is simply the seed and the hint of its destiny grownup self. 29 on the epicentre of the motion in New Comedy, for that reason, are characters whose allegiance to ‘virtue’ (an notion predicated politically in addition to ethically) is seriously compromised through the irrational, animalistic forces that within them nonetheless reign best; who're at risk of akrasia (lack of strength of mind) and whose ethical behaviour is 27 28 29 The locus classicus is Rh. 1388b31–1390b8. On Aristotle’s eudaimonia being vulnerable to exterior conditions, that could have everlasting strains on ēthos, cf. Nussbaum (1986) 307–9, 318ff. , and esp. 336–40, with a dialogue of the passage from the Rhetoric.